


Pick It Up, Pick It All Up

by thegrumblingirl



Series: With Pleasure, M. With Pleasure. [2]
Category: James Bond (Movies), Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Daughter: Medicine, M/M, Song fic, slight divergence from canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-03
Updated: 2013-08-03
Packaged: 2017-12-22 07:26:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 741
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/910526
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegrumblingirl/pseuds/thegrumblingirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The image of Bond in Cairo and the Bond in Churchill’s bunker, overlaid, didn’t match.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pick It Up, Pick It All Up

**Author's Note:**

> This is set to the lyrics of _Medicine_ by Daughter [[x]](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrulQAZq7Y8). Slightly AU in that... well, you'll see. (Also, AU from _They Say He's a Wild One_.)

_Pick it up, pick it all up  
And start again_

What no-one talked about was that they’d met before, in Cairo. Both travelling on unofficial business, Mallory had stepped out of the British embassy just as Bond was planning on breaking in later that night.

They hadn’t spoken — Bond had had no idea who Mallory was, while Mallory had known exactly who was prowling the street in intervals. Nevertheless, he had walked past him without another glance in his direction, doing what protocol dictated. He’d had no idea that 007 had a job to do in Cairo, so it hadn’t been his place to even acknowledge him and risk blowing his cover.

_You've got a second chance,_  
_you could go home,_  
_Escape it all —_  
_It's just irrelevant._

Still, the look he’d got had told him enough. If terrorists and criminals across the globe whispered and screamed the name of James Bond, 007 of Her Majesty’s Secret Service, then so did the Clandestine community. Apparently, with good reason. Bond moved like an angry tiger — not quite gracefully enough to be considered suave, but he left no doubt that there was destruction lingering in his easy steps. He threw his orders into the wind when he felt like it, and added insult to injury practically everywhere he went. Indispensable to the firm, he got away with nearly everything.

Someday, his luck would run out.

_It's just medicine.  
It's just medicine._

Two years later, Bond came back from the dead, and drafting an appropriate response to that led Mallory to almost breaking his coffee machine when he got the call. His steps grew heavier the closer he came to Vauxhall Cross from his office at the Ministry, relief being browbeaten by disbelief and skepticism. Bond had been shot months ago, MI6 had stopped looking for him three weeks after the incident. He had chosen a strange time to return — too strange for someone who’d wanted to come back all along.

‘M,’ prompted the psychologist.

_You could still be,_  
_what you want to,_  
_What you said you were,_  
_when I met you._

‘Bitch,’ came the reply, Bond smirking. Bond didn’t turn towards the glass, didn’t check for traces of silhouettes.  Next to Mallory, M smiled to herself, his own sarcastic comment falling through the cracks in the veneer: cracks in the walls and ceiling of the bunker, cracks in Bond’s armour. Wearing sweats and a jumper, he could have looked like a recruit, if not for the lines around his eyes when he sneered and the grizzly scruff of his beard. He didn’t shuffle his feet when he left the room, refusing to give an answer to ‘Skyfall,’ but if Mallory had been asked to play the association game with ‘James Bond,’ he’d have said, ‘tired.’ It sat in his bones and the tense slope of his shoulders.

Why had he come back?

M declared Bond fit for active service. Tanner very carefully did not move, neither did Bond. Mallory’s gaze roamed the room and the people in it: a tick in the corner of the mouth, the measured movements of veiled surprise, and the red-rimmed lower eyelids of someone with a borderline substance addiction.

_You've got a warm heart,_  
_You've got a beautiful brain,_  
_But it's disintegrating,_  
_from all the medicine_  
_from all the medicine_  
_from all the medicine_  
_Medicine._

He watched as Bond moved to leave the room, the tension coiled in his movements a far cry from the feline agility of years and missions past. Mallory’s eyes narrowed even as he smiled, perhaps maliciously.

‘Why not stay dead?’

Bond swivelled on his heels, his expression carefully indifferent. ‘Hire me or fire me, it’s entirely up to you.’

Except it wasn’t, not really — M was still his superior and head of the division. Mallory’s veto would cause disruption and a stir that would make the hearing at Westminster even more difficult. Animosity for who he was and what he was doing rolled off of 007 in waves.

_You could still be,_  
_what you want to be,_  
_What you said you were,_  
_when you met me_

The image of Bond in Cairo and the Bond in Churchill’s bunker, overlaid, didn’t match.

‘You’re sentimental about him,’ was the closest he came to saying that he didn’t believe Bond had actually passed the tests. He walked out, with a warning, before he found himself saying, ‘You don’t have to do this, you’ve done enough. Save yourself.’

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I own nothing, I get nothing. Comments are my catnip.
> 
> Crossposted on ff.net.


End file.
